#3 The Rough Draft

Okay. You’ve had a go at one or more prewriting techniques, and you’ve finally reached that itchy and inspired state … you’re ready to write!

Then you sit in front of a blank screen and it starts staring back at you. Maybe you type a few words … see immediately how absolutely idiotic they are … delete them … try again. It seems hopeless. Nothing you write seems as good as what you imagined. Certainly nothing seems as good as what you’ve read.

You consider the possiblity that you may be the stupidest person on earth.

You’re not stupid; you have BPS (Blank Page Syndrome). It’s the most common disease among writers and would-be writers … and it can lead to the more serious form ‘Writer’s Block,’ where you simply can’t bring yourself to write at all.

But there’s a cure! It’s called The Rough Draft.

You’ve heard the expression before. You may have even written something once or twice and shown it to someone saying, as you cast your eyes shyly downward, ‘It’s just a rough draft.’

But you didn’t mean it, did you? You were insulating yourself from criticism by doing the ‘Aw, shucks, it’s just rough,’ routine. But what you really wanted was praise.

Let’s face it: writers, like everyone else, want to be loved. Writing is hard, and we want praise for the effort we’ve expended, for the gems of creativity we managed to conjure forth. Showing our work to someone else is risky, frightening. After all, writing is nothing more than a series of choices, and what if some (or all!) of our choices were naïve, trite, ignorant or, worst of all, boring!

That fear can be stifling. As I said, writing is making choices, and if we second-guess each choice (Should I start here? Is this the right word? Should this be a colon or a semi-colon?) we’ll never be able to make any progress.

The Clay Sculpture Metaphor

The most beautiful sculpture ever modelled from clay began exactly like the ugliest: as a formless lump. A sculptor doesn’t immediately touch a pile of clay and magically create, say, a perfect human eye, moving on to a perfect nose, and eventually sculpting a perfect bust suitable for a museum.

She begins with small tentative moves, adding clay here, removing some there, smoothing lumps, making impressions. Slowly the lump of clay begins to have a general shape of her subject. When something doesn’t seem right, it is easily changed, and she just continues to model until that ugly lump is transformed into something beautiful.

Writers have a hard time learning this simple lesson. You have to allow yourself to write badly in order, eventually, to write well. Even the most experienced writer doesn’t just sit down and compose deathless prose.

Faith

It all comes down to faith. If you have faith that your final draft will eventually be the gem you want it to be, you can have the confidence to allow yourself a few rough drafts that, well, stink up the place. In fact, I’d venture that the only significant difference between my first draft and those of beginning writers is that I have faith that mine will get better with revision.

The trick is to allow your first draft to be absolute, smell-up-the-house, rubbish. In my next post I’ll talk about the revision process which is where the rubbish slowly gets transformed into the good stuff.

That is not the job of the rough draft. The job of the rough draft is to get the ideas that you captured through the prewriting process into some kind of shape that you can begin to manipulate. Think of prewriting as the decision to sculpt a bust, and drafting as the process of setting the lump of clay on the table and giving it the general shape of a head. Ears and noses and eyes with charming little laugh lines around them can all wait for revision.

The great news is that writing a rough draft … when you really allow the draft to be rough … is easy! It’s easy because when you let go of judgement, when you accept that it will be as smelly as a wet dog at first, you can relax and just get the words on the page. That’s the job of the rough draft. And that’s your job when you first sit down to write.

So, have a seat and knock out a crappy rough draft. Then take a little break. When you look it over, it probably won’t be as god-awful as you feared. There’s probably some stuff worth keeping here. Good. The draft has done its job. Now, take a deep breath, roll up your sleeves, and … you guessed it: write another one.

Trust me. This one will be even better. You just gotta have a little faith.